Thunder in the valley

On a summer day in the early 1980s, Cathy Wilson heard an eerie noise coming from her backyard. It sounded, impossibly, like thunder. Fellow residents of Moodus, Connecticut reported the same thing: a series of cracks and roars coming from the Earth.

It turns out that Moodus residents have been hearing these sorts of sounds for hundreds of years. And I decided to go there to investigate — just what are these strange noises?

This story appeared on Stylus, an experimental documentary series about sound, music, and listening, presented by WBUR.